"Twenty-First Century Exhibit"
Listen to Tomás Q. Morin read this poem.
At the Museum of Natural History,
three guards in blue eyed us while the fourth,
shorter than the others, traced our bodies
with a wand. Satisfied, they returned our keys,
coffee, eyeglasses, and marched us into the exhibit
crafted to look like an office purged of its desks,
its loping workers, the maze of gray-board cubicles.
In the center of the room, a water cooler
stood patiently. In vain, we tried to explicate
the intent: "A metaphor for the modern personality,"
said a man with cockroach eyebrows. "No,
it's the perfect marriage of form and content,"
uttered a woman in a beret. Just then, the artist,
who had been hidden among us, crossed the rope
and knelt at the cooler, his lips working the spigot
while the rest of us stared, tongues too dumb
to say anything as the water hiccuped and disappeared.
He gleefully pointed at his rounded belly,
How Can You Survive in an Air Bubble 100 Feet Underwater for Three Days?
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Tomas Q. Morin's poems have appeared in New England Review, Poetry International, and Narrative. He was the winner of the 2010 Boulevard Emerging Poets Contest.
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